When all of this around us'll fall over
by SombraAlma
Summary: Kate and Sun, AU post-rescue. "It starts out as comfort and maybe it ends there, too."


Title: When all of this around us'll fall over  
Rating: PG-13  
Disclaimer: Don't own them; just borrowing.  
Summary: _It starts out as comfort and maybe it ends there, too. _Kate/Sun, with mentions of Sun/Jin and Kate/Sawyer.  
Note: AU post-rescue. My own, unspoiled, O6 speculation, or part of it. No season 4 spoilers. For the current picture prompt at lostfemmeslash. Title comes from Ray LaMontagne's "Shelter."

-----

It starts out as comfort: Sun plants flowers now.

It's soothing, she tells you, to have her hands in soft dirt again. Digging and burying and patting the sun-warmed soil, and not for graves this time, but for new life springing from the earth. The once-precious fruits and herbs and vegetables are readily available at the farmer's market just down the road, and anyway, there wouldn't be room in your small rooftop plot for a proper garden.

Sun tells you she's always preferred flowers, anyway.

You think you know better when you find the other woman on the roof, crying over a delicate white bloom that's just opened on one of the plants. You intend to back quietly down the ladder again, but Sun lifts her head and smiles, weakly, through her tears.

"He gave me one of these, once. There." You never have to ask who. Or where.

(_He_ never gave you flowers. And you can't grow a mix tape in a rooftop garden in Los Angeles. Sometimes you're jealous, just a little.)

-----

It starts out as comfort: Sun sleeps pressed against you now.

The Santa Anas blow in hot and dry that winter, and Sun admonishes you, anxiously. "Get down from there; you're going to blow over the side." So you leave the roof and the quiet clattering of the dry plants in the wind and stay downstairs in the hot, dusty apartment, instead.

There's grit between your fingers, in your sheets, settling on your sweaty skin. When Sun tiptoes into your bedroom for the first time, her voice is apologetic. "These winds...they're too much. I can't stand them."

You watch her lay down on the bed, back to you. And slowly, you inch closer, wrapping an arm protectively around the other woman's small body.

(Sometimes, the winds sound too much like whispers to you. Sun would understand if you ever said so aloud.)

And when she instinctively presses her body back against you, you're surprised to find that it's not uncomfortable, despite the sweat and the grit and the winds whispering outside the window.

-----

It starts out as comfort and maybe it ends there, too. The winds blow away and the flowers are planted again, another cycle, another season, another year.

There are two names the both of you never speak. Two faces only seen in dreams.

You wake from a nightmare (never said they were good dreams) and Sun holds you tightly until the shaking and whimpering stops. She murmurs to you in Korean when this happens, her breath against your ear, fingers in your hair, lips pressed to your cheek.

It would be easy to rationalize this away, you think. You've been sharing the same bed, holding each other through winds and storms and nightmares, for months. You lay together like lovers and yet you're not --

You don't want to rationalize this away. You can't.

Somehow, Sun doesn't even seem surprised when you slip your hand under her shirt, though her abdomen tenses involuntarily at the sensation of nails against skin. Hips press together now, as if you've planned this all along, and the curves you've both already memorized in sleep move to accommodate this new yet somehow familiar choreography.

It's summer and there's not much to take off, so soon it's just you and her and tangled sheets, hands and breasts and hips and thighs. You're touching her like you want to be touched, and she's touching you the way she likes it, and it's surprising to you, in the brief remaining moments of clarity, that they're one in the same. (It's never been one in the same before.) She's murmuring in Korean again, but you can tell the words are different this time.

This is no nightmare, not anymore.

Your mouths are open and you're breathing the same air, but somehow, you can't let your lips touch hers. So you focus on other parts of her, instead, and your tongue on the curve of her shoulder matches the caress of your hand on the inside of her thigh.

And then it's over, too quickly, and you mutter a quiet apology into her neck. She just laughs, a low sound into your hair. "It's been a long time, Kate."

Later, you'll remember there are still the two names you never speak. (Sun will plant white orchids and you'll buy a Phil Collins CD that you'll never take out of its case.)

But now – now, you do kiss her, in the sweaty, tangled afterglow, and it's slow and languid and nothing about this ends too quickly. Not now.


End file.
